Skepticism

EVENTS

Immured behind walls of paper for the nonce

It’s that time. Finals are over. The students get to relax, and many of them get to travel home to enjoy time with family. And we professors get to sit before stacks of exams, a battery of red pens at hand, and begin the awful process of grading.

I am about to cloister myself with two sets of exams and a pile of term papers, and I will not emerge until they are done. My goal is to get through them all before our trip to Minneapolis tomorrow. So no distractions allowed.

Poopyhead has emtombed himself behind walls for protection against the advancing paperocalypse. So it’s not quite redundant, but one can only hope (assuming one is rooting for poopyhead) that he’s used British industrial cheddar — possible the most impenetrable substance known, capable of slowing down a pea — to build his barricade.

Interesting. I wasn’t aware of the UK slang sense of nonce, mostly using it myself in the technical cryptographic sense or (sometimes) in the related lexicographic sense, and occasionally in the (rather rare?) sense poopyhead probably meant.

PBS recently aired a stage show called The Nance starring Nathan Lane, about a gay man trying to stay employed on Broadway in the 1930s. I had never heard the term ‘nance’ before, but it seems pretty obvious it derives from ‘nancy boy’. I imagine ‘nonce’ as used in this sense is similar.

In an amusing & typical distortion from one of the trolls, Martin Wiesner AKA Pogsurf, one of more supercilious & stupid members of that crowd, has just announced to David Gorski on Twitter that I am now calling myself “the Nonce”, as evidence that I’m a sex offender.

Let me know if Nugent adds it to one of his interminable lists of my crimes.

Ham IV.vii.159 [Claudius to Laertes, of Hamlet] I’ll have preferred him / A chalice for the nonce
1H4 I.ii.177 [Poins to Prince Hal] I have cases of buckram for the nonce
1H6 II.iii.56 [Countess to Talbot, of his reply] This is a riddling merchant for the nonce

So, only a dirty or presuppositional (PZ must be wrong) mind would make it anything else…

I’m American, and I have never heard the word “nonce” before this thread. Then I looked it up in multiple places, including the slang definitions, read about nonce words and nonce numbers on wikipedia, and then knew way too much about the word.

And then I also learned some shit about linguistics. Damn, I was bored.

In an amusing & typical distortion from one of the trolls, Martin Wiesner AKA Pogsurf, one of more supercilious & stupid members of that crowd, has just announced to David Gorski on Twitter that I am now calling myself “the Nonce”, as evidence that I’m a sex offender.

Does that fuckwit (hey Nugent, if you’re reading, add me to the list of people who calls others a ‘fuckwit’) think the sex offender definition of nonce makes sense in the context of the title of this post? Geez. Someone needs to upgrade the thinky thing between their ears.
Oh, gee, was that too mean?